As a result, Hayward left school in 1934 at 16 to become an apprentice at Dollis Hill, where he collaborated with Dr Eric Speight on making the TIM speaking clock service.

Expecting to be dropped into Turkey to sabotage telecoms systems, Hayward was instead called back to London in 1943, and was recalled by Dollis Hill to be assigned to Bletchly Park.

By the culmination of the war, as many as 15 Tunny machines were used at Bletchley Park, supplying Allied leaders close to 300 messages from the German High Command per week.

[3] After the war, Hayward was initially posted to Palestine in 1946 then worked on a secret voice encipherment system before moving to Ghana in 1951 to install telecoms networks.

In the 1990s he helped researchers at The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) rebuild the Tunny and Colossus machines by crafting new parts[5] from blueprints he had kept against the orders of Winston Churchill who was concerned that they could fall into Soviet hands.